Dev reads every ToS for his news aggregator, finds big sites most restrictive

A developer building devdigest, a daily AI-curated tech digest, reviewed the Terms of Service for all his RSS sources before monetising the product. Contrary to his expectations, large corporate and VC-data sites like Crunchbase, TechRadar, HPCwire, Cloudflare, and Sifted carried the most restrictive clauses, many explicitly banning AI training, scraping, and automated data extraction. Smaller, distribution-focused outlets such as InfoQ, MIT News, TechCrunch, arXiv, and GitHub were largely permissive, with some terms directly describing and approving his summarise-and-link pipeline. The developer theorises that restrictive sites are protecting or building future data-licensing businesses, making an AI-training ban a commercial asset. Meanwhile, syndication-native publishers treat RSS feeds as a distribution channel, so broad access aligns with their business model.